NFT sales plummet 98% in eight months of this year

The rage among celebrities last year, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), have been hit badly by the crypto winter and have seen sales dip by 98 percent in the eight months since January, Coin Telegraph has reported.

It might be difficult to believe that the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) collections that netizens were willing to splurge millions on just 12 months ago have fallen out of favor so fast. The top choice for NFTs, until earlier this year, has lost its preferential status to NFTs like Terraforms and Cryptopunks, Gizmodo reported.

How bad are trading volumes for NFTs?

According to data compiled by Dune Analytics, the weekly trading volume of NFTs dropped to $114 million in September. This is a massive drop of 98 percent, considering that the weekly trading volumes at the end of January were still around $6.2 billion.

The analysis carried out by Dune included a host of NFT platforms such as OpenSea, NFTX, LarvaLabs, LooksRare, SuperRare, Rarible, and Foundation. It also showed an unexpected change when the platform LooksRare bagged the top spot in terms of trading volume from OpenSea for a brief period of time.

Trading volumes, however, have reduced across platforms with even OpenSea seeing a 75 percent drop in its sales from just two months ago. It is likely that the drop in the price of the cryptocurrency, especially ETH, which is preferred for NFT transactions, may also be responsible.

In early January, prior to the cryptocurrency crash, an average NFT sale was around $2,000, while it has now dropped to $285.

All is not lost. Yet

The numbers might look grim and sound like the end of the NFT boom. However, all does not seem to be lost yet. The analysis also showed that the number of traders in the NFT marketplace was still significant. In March, as many as 66,000 traders occupied the NFT marketplaces and the numbers dropped only to 42,000 as of September, near about the traders that were actively trading in March, the Gizmodo report said.

The number of active users on platforms like Open Sea has only dropped five percent and that could be due to the dropping popularity of famed NFTS like BAYC. According to the analysis, the trading volume of Terraforms was at 12,202 ETH compared to 3,364 ETH for the BAYC.

Gizmodo also cited reports of NFT hacks as another proof that while people may not be trading NFTs as much, the interest in digital collectibles still reigns supreme. The number of accounts owning an NFT has also surged from 3.36 million earlier this year to 6.14 million in September, CoinTelegraph said in its report.

Interest in NFT from businesses isn't waning either, with NFT stamps being trialed in Austria and Mastercard debuting its NFT-customized debit cards. Starbucks has also launched its NFT that it calls stamps, while Redditt's version is dubbed "collectible avatars".

NFT sales might be down on trading sites but the interest continues.